[Quote:]

With the knowledge that the minority vote will be crucial in the upcoming presidential election, Republican Party officials are urging blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities to make their presence felt at the polls on Wednesday, Nov. 3.

“Minority voters should make their unique voices heard, especially the African-American voting bloc, which is always a major factor in every election,” said Florida Republican Party voter-drive organizer Mark Monreal, as he handed out flyers at a community center in the mostly black Miami neighborhood of South Farms. “That’s why we put up hundreds of brightly colored banners featuring Martin Luther King Jr. and the ‘Vote November 3′ reminder. We needed to make sure they know when we want them at polling places.”

“You can’t walk through a black neighborhood here in Miami without seeing our ‘Don’t Forget Big Wednesday!’ message up on a billboard, tacked to a phone booth, or taped to a bus shelter,” Monreal added. “The Republican Party has spared no expense in this endeavor.”

(the Onion also has some great tips on voting in the same issue)

[Quote...]

So you’ve got a Gmail mail account? Or maybe you’ve just received an invitation? Well, we have some bad news for you: Your mail box is exposed. A major security hole in Google’s mail service, allows full access to user accounts, without the need of a password.

“Everything could get publicly exposed – your received mails might be readable, as well as all of your sent mail, and furthermore – anyone could send and receive mail under your name”, thus reveals Nir Goldshlagger, an Israeli hacker, on an exclusive interview with Nana NetLife Magazine. “Even more alarming”, he explains, “is the fact that the hack itself is quite simple. All that is needed of the malicious hacker, beside knowledge of the specific technique, is quite basic computer knowledge, the victim’s username – and that’s it, he’s inside”.

“In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time — literally — substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices.
For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”

(Peter F. Drucker)

[Quote:]

For any of you who doubted the reports of Right Wing voter suppression campaigns, here’s a sample letter that was sent to a largely-Democratic, largely-people of color community in Ohio:

I guess they’re taking the fine out of your inheritance…

[Quote:]

We would like to apologize to you and to those who frequent the suicidegirls.com website for inadvertently contacting you about a fan posting on the website.

We know that many of our fans are old enough to make their own choice about what they want to view on the Internet. We value the support of our fans and we respect their decisions. The letter was sent as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children. We are proud of our efforts in this area. Unfortunately, the site posting identified in our letter was targeted by mistake.

[Quote:]

Based in The Hague, with a Dutch chief executive and a Dutch chairman, for Royal Dutch Shell yesterday’s reforms might seem a shift in power to the Netherlands.

Do not believe it: this is an outright victory for the British and American financial institutions which demanded that Shell organise itself as a normal company. They have been granted their wishes in spades. The new company will be a full-blooded member of London’s FTSE 100, its management subject to the same laws of shareholder accountability as BP.

If you thought that was the case already, you haven’t been paying attention to how they saw things in the Netherlands. Over there, Royal Dutch seemed a quasi arm of the state. The royal family still has a stake; Wim Kok, the former prime minister, is on the supervisory board; and the country’s last EU commissioner spent 16 years at Shell.

The sense of Dutchness was embodied in the 60% stake held by Royal Dutch. The fact that the actual shareholders in Royal Dutch were mostly the usual crew of international institutions didn’t seem to matter; the Dutch establishment still thought it had the power of veto over radical reform.

Yesterday proved they do not. Dutchmen may have the top jobs now, but that was probably the fig leaf required to make the reforms acceptable in Amsterdam. The company said chairman Aad Jacobs would be replaced by an external appointment in 2006.

[Quote:]

Het College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens heeft per ongeluk de e-mailadressen van duizend op zijn nieuwsbrief geabonneerde mensen prijsgegeven. “Er is technisch iets fout gegaan. Dat ons zoiets overkomt, vinden we bepaald niet leuk”, aldus een woordvoerder donderdag.

Het college, dat zich inzet voor de bescherming van de privacy van Nederlanders, heeft sinds 2003 een nieuwsbrief die via e-mail wordt verspreid. Elke twee tot drie weken krijgen 4000 abonnees de nieuwsbrief.

De brief gaat in plukken van duizend e-mailadressen via het e-mailprogramma Outlookexpress naar de abonnees. De redactie van de nieuwsbrief zet de adressen in het BCC-veld (Blind Carbon Copie) en verstuurt de mail.

“Normaal zie je dan de overige namen en adressen niet, maar nu stonden ze toch allemaal in het Aan- of het CC-veld van de mail”, aldus de woordvoerder. Vervelende bijkomstigheid was dat de excuusmail die het college daarop verstuurde opnieuw alle namen en adressen bevatte.

[Quote:]

The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co., seeking an interview with a top Army contracting officer and collecting documents from several government offices.

The line of inquiry expands an earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company.

The full moon turns red and orange as it passes the Space Needle in Seattle during a total lunar eclipse Wednesday evening, Oct. 27, 2004. With the Earth passing between the sun and the moon, the only light hitting the full moon was from the home planet’s sunrises and sunsets, resulting in the orange and red hue. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

[Quote:]

So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn’t been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.

So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

“I was shaking in my shoes,” Cox said of the September phone call. “My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in my opinion. If I’m closed even for a day that would cause undue stress.”

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik’s Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.

He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik’s Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy’s trademark.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency’s intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

“One of the things that our agency’s responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation’s financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications,” she said.

Six weeks after her brush with Homeland Security, Cox told The Oregonian she is still bewildered by the experience.

“Aren’t there any terrorists out there?” she said.

It’s amazing how many cell phones have a camera these days…

[Quote:]

Any battle to succeed Yasser Arafat would be fought initially among the older generation of Palestinian politicians and fighters who spent most of their lives in exile with the president.

But the real battle will be within a younger, homegrown generation of politicians who were brought up and raised in the West Bank and Gaza.

Mr Arafat’s likeliest successors are Mahmoud Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, and Ahmed Qureia, known as Abu Ala.

The new generation, leaders such as Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan, may make way for the two Abus this time round, with Mr Mazen possibly taking charge of the PLO and Mr Ala as president of the Palestinian Authority. But Mr Rajoub and Mr Dahlan will be preparing their future bids, as they have been for the past few years.

Marwan Barghouti – another, more popular, member of that generation and the most likely long-term successor – is still in jail in Israel.

Here are some more pictures somebody took, but the first one above stood out. Bush supporters are allowed in – no loyalty oath, no heckling. The third picture is from Yahoo.

Seals used by the IAEA (bottom). A seal on an Iraqi bunker door videotaped by a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew on April 18, 2003 (top).

[Quote:]

A 5 Eyewitness News crew in Iraq may have been just a door away from materials that could be used to detonate nuclear weapons. The evidence is in videotape shot by Reporter Dean Staley and Photographer Joe Caffrey at or near the Al Qaqaa munitions facility.

The video shows a cable locking a door shut. That cable is connected by a copper colored seal.

A spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency told 5 Eyewitness News that seal appears to be one used by their inspectors. “In Iraq they were used when there was a concern that this could have a, what we call, dual use purpose, that there could be a nuclear weapons application.”

[Quote:]

DAVID KAY, FMR. U.S. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Good to be with you, Aaron.

BROWN: I don’t know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I’ll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.

KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that’s an IAEA seal. I’ve never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You’ll see it somewhat differently.

KAY: Well, it’s interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.

And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that’s either HMX or RDX. I don’t know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.

BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn’t know what they had.

KAY: I think quite likely they didn’t know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives.

And to put this in context, I think it’s important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

BROWN: Could you — I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics.

KAY: So am I. BROWN: I’m not sure you can necessarily. I know. It’s a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?

KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented.

Iraq had, and it’s a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

BROWN: David, as quickly as you can because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?

KAY: Oh, absolutely not.

This is it folks. Conclusive proof. Case closed. No Russians moving it to Syria, no looting before the invasion.

Time for Bush to explain how his war planning gifted terrorists with (at least) 760,000 pounds of high explosives to use against our troops and god knows who else. Time to explain what the real motives for the Iraqi invasion were.

Time for me to endorse Kerry wholeheartedly as well, if only to get this moron out of the White House.

[Quote:]

Buy a TiVo lately? Sometime in the next few months, your machine will quietly download a patch that makes it respond to a new copy protection scheme from software maker Macrovision. The app puts restrictions on how long your DVR can save certain kinds of shows – so far, just pay-per-view and video-on-demand programs. It’s the first time your TiVo won’t let you watch whatever you want, whenever you want

A guy goes into a sex shop and asks for a rubber doll. The guy behind the counter says “Normal or Muslim?”. “What’s the difference?” asks the customer. “The Muslim one blows itself up.”

One day a man came home and was greeted by his wife dressed in a very sexy nightie. “Tie me up,” she purred, “and you can do anything you want.” So he tied her up and went to the pub…

[Quote:]

A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war.

There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Wednesday, 1,081 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department.

The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their projections on were of “limited precision,” because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.

Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study is being published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal.

The survey indicated violence accounted for most of the extra deaths seen since the invasion, and air strikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths, the researchers wrote in the British-based journal.

“Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children,” they said.

A 70-year-old Texas Rancher got his hand caught in a gate while working cattle. He wrapped the hand in his bandana and drove his pickup to the doctor. While suturing the laceration, the doctor asked the old man about George W. Bush being in the White House.

The old Texan said, “Well, ya know, Bush is a ‘Post Turtle.’”

Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked what a Post Turtle was.

The old man looked at him and drawled, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a Post Turtle.”

The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain:

“You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he can’t get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor bastard get down.”

If you get a chance to see the latest Southpark (Season 8 Episode 8), do. It’s a perfect summary of the election season…

This is what the South Park website has to say about it:

When PETA demonstrates against the use of a cow as South Park Elementary’s mascot, the student body is forced to choose a new one. As the election approaches, Kyle tries to convince everyone that his candidate, a giant douche, is better than Cartman’s nominee, a turd sandwich.

[Quote:]

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein was in the area where tons of explosives disappeared, and may have videotaped some of those weapons.

The missing explosives are now an issue in the presidential debate. Democratic candidate John Kerry is accusing President Bush of not securing the site they allegedly disappeared from. President Bush says no one knows if the ammunition was taken before or after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 when coalition troops moved in to the area.

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.

“For a political candidate to jump to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.”

George W. Bush

“President Bush couldn’t be more right. He jumped to conclusions about any connection between Saddam Hussein and 911. He jumped to conclusions about weapons of mass destruction. He jumped to conclusions about the mission being accomplished. He jumped to conclusions about how we had enough troops on the ground to win the peace. And because he jumped to conclusions, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq may very well have their hands on powerful explosives to attack our troops, we are stuck in Iraq without a plan to win the peace, and Americans are less safe both at home and abroad. By doing all these things, he broke faith with our men and women in uniform. He has let them down. George W. Bush is unfit to be our Commander in Chief.”

Wesley Clark

This story has “Karl Rove” written all over it..

[Quote:]

Tens of thousands of postal ballots have gone missing in the US state of Florida, sparking fresh concern over irregularities in the poll campaign.

Some 60,000 absentee ballots were despatched by authorities in Broward County, north of Miami, this month.

[..]

Both the Democrats and Republicans have already begun filing lawsuits in states across the US, challenging different aspects of the election process.

[Quote:]

Reporters Without Borders announces its third annual worldwide index of press freedom. Such freedom is threatened most in East Asia (with North Korea at the bottom of the entire list at 167th place, followed by Burma 165th, China 162nd, Vietnam 161st and Laos 153rd) and the Middle East (Saudi Arabia 159th, Iran 158th, Syria 155th, Iraq 148th).

In these countries, an independent media either does not exist or journalists are persecuted and censored on a daily basis. Freedom of information and the safety of journalists are not guaranteed there. Continuing war has made Iraq the most deadly place on earth for journalists in recent years, with 44 killed there since fighting began in March last year.

But there are plenty of other black spots around the world for press freedom. Cuba (in 166th place) is second only to China as the biggest prison for journalists, with 26 in jail (China has 27). Since spring last year, these 26 independent journalists have languished in prison after being given sentences of between 14 and 27 years.

No privately-owned media exist in Turkmenistan (164th) and Eritrea (163rd), whose people can only read, see or listen to government-controlled media dominated by official propaganda.

The greatest press freedom is found in northern Europe (Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, the Netherlands and Norway), which is a haven of peace for journalists. Of the top 20 countries, only three (New Zealand 9th, Trinidad and Tobago 11th and Canada 18th) are outside Europe.

[Quote:]

No, this ain’t The Onion. But it is ridiculous. Suicidegirls founder Sean says:

I got this email this morning from the law firm that represent Nintendo. They are claiming that the member RuneLateralus listing Zelda and Metorid as his favortie video games in his profile is an infringement on Nintendo’s intellectual property. I enjoy an ice cold coca cola on a hot day. Do you think Coca Cola is going to sue me for posting that?

Remember, kids, lawyers are evil and all they want to do is figure a way to bill you more of their time. Nintendo is actually paying these people to threaten me over RuneLateralus favorite video games listing on his profile. What a bunch of morons.

Link to SG blog post with full text of Nintendo nastygram. (Ed. note: SuicideGirls is a sponsor of BoingBoing)

UPDATE: Link to update post

A banana spider’s web, saturated by a morning dew, is highlighted by the sun in the Apalachicola National Forest, Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004, in Sopchoppy, Fla. (AP Photo/Phil Coale)

Although I’m glad the election campaign is almost over, I’m going to miss the wealth of cartoons – it’s definately silly season right now.. Click the link below to see some more…

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